Cameron Wolfe, lost and found

Cath Crowley went in search of a fictional character but
found a true-life story.

If I'm honest, I went looking for Cameron Wolfe not Markus Zusak.
And that's just crazy, because he's a character in a book.

It's not the first time I've crossed the border from fact into fiction. I
visited briefly in grade 6 when I wrote to Trixie Beldon for a job in her
crime-fighting agency. When you are 10 it's called imagination; at 30 it's just
delusional. I'm 31.

The problem was, I had spent too much time with Cameron. In one weekend I had
read The Underdog, Fighting Ruben Wolfe and When Dogs
Cry. I had fought with Cameron in the boxing ring. We had stood outside
Stephanie's house, even though it was his brother Rube that she liked. Cameron
didn't have many friends, and his luck with the girls wasn't great, but he was a
fighter, a poet. I wanted to meet him, grown up and off the page. And then I
read that the books were autobiographical. Cameron had a face.

I rationalised why I would spend $200 on a plane ticket. Zusak is a highly
acclaimed young adult writer. At 27, he has written four books: the Wolfe
trilogy and The Messenger.

He says more in a word than some writers do in a paragraph. Hard words. Cut
with poetry.

Sharp. I have heard teenagers say that his writing steals breath.

They were all good reasons. They weren't why I went to Sydney, though; I
didn't lie to myself. I lied to him instead.

I caught a train to Cronulla, travelled through suburbs near to where Zusak
grew up. Through the window, clotheslines tilted and houses elbowed each other
for room. In a yard I could not see, I imagined two boys were playing One Punch.
I drank in the terrain of Cameron's childhood.

At the station I met a real Cameron and his wife, Dominika, both sweating
from their bike ride. Where was Octavia, the girl who read his poetry? Where
were the dark "crappy streets past Central Station" described in The
Underdog? Our landscape that day was the ocean and burning light. It
belonged to Markus, not Cameron. To Dominika, not Octavia.

This is a new story.

Zusak is relaxed and confident. Cameron and Octavia are where they belong.
They hover in the landscape that Zusak created for them, a world "dirty but
alive", he explains. "I started walking around the city and I knew that was
where Cameron belonged. It suited Cameron's character that there was this
grubbiness about the place that he was trying to rise above." This grubbiness
is in Zusak's voice too, like traces of dirt under fingernails that are jagged
and rough. Cameron is in Zusak. Somewhere.

They both started to write as teenagers.

"Before that I wanted to be a football player," Zusak explains, "and then I
realised I was too scrawny and weak, there was too much pain involved." They
have both stood in phone boxes trying to find the courage to call a girl: "She
gave herself excuses for the next four weeks." Zusak's honesty is a knife
stripping off skin.

He did not stand outside the girl's house like Cameron, though, he is
adamant. "I wasn't that pathetic." Zusak's got some of Rube's confidence now.
Rube comes out "when I'm standing in front of 150 year 9 kids and you've just
gotta grab 'em by the throat and say, y'know?" It can't be easy to admit being
part underdog when faced with 13-year-old boys who tell him that Cameron's a
loser. "The world loves a Rube. Rube's gunna entertain them," Zusak says,
"but Cameron's gunna look after them." Zusak's eyes have not moved far from
the water while his wife swims.

She comes back, shaking water onto the table. "I swam out to the buoys,"
she says, "went under the water and everything." "I saw someone swimming and
thought who's that lunatic?" he answers. It's this language of the everyday
that Zusak uses in his writing. Characters such as Cameron and Rube "just say
quick things. In the dark," he explains. "So many people have said that the
only time they could speak to their brother or sister was at night. With the
lights out." Zusak believes that there is a beauty in the ordinary, just
"people carrying their shopping home is a kind of beauty". Dominika moves off
to sit with a stray dog. "A beautiful thing there," Zusak says, distracted by
her.

His books don't try to explore social issues.

The messages are just there, dark shapes in the water, swimming below the
surface. "The Wolfes aren't natural winners but they fight anyway. There's a
nobility in that," Zusak comments.

The books are about people being fallible too. "Cameron is aware of his
fallibility. Rube has to walk into the realisation of his." In the hands of
Zusak, his characters are put in situations where they struggle, but don't
necessarily win.

Zusak's latest book, The Messenger, explores the idea that the
author is the god of his text, with the power to manipulate his characters and
his readers. The book's content is "in my control," Zusak explains. His words
create images of bookstores, lined with universes, their characters waiting for
their fates to play out.

Zusak's author gave him a talent for writing. Without it, he says, "I would
be doing something I'd be pretty miserable in". Even so, he wrote for a long
time before The Underdog was published. He was in Vienna when his dad
rang with the news. Zusak remembers it as "the most exciting moment of his
life". As soon as the sun came up, he walked around the town. He picked up a
white feather for his sister to mark where he was when she rang to congratulate
him. Zusak's author has a knack for poetry too.

My author never intended me to find Cameron. I was given something better:
Markus Zusak and Dominika, the ocean and a dog. A story written just for me to
find.